Fermi Gets Ally In Bid For New Unit

October 18, 1985|By Rudolph Unger and Maria Mooshil.

Having just completed the $1.2 billion first phase of the Deep Tunnel pollution and flood control project, the Metropolitan Sanitary District has set its sights on helping the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory capture a new $4 billion federally funded project.

The district`s board Thursday voted to attempt to become a major partner in helping Fermilab, near Batavia, win the right to construct the world`s largest atom smasher to be known as the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC). ``Our engineering staff has been working with the U.S. Department of Energy and Fermi officials to show them how our deep tunneling techniques and machinery could be used to build that Super Collider faster and cheaper here than anywhere else in the nation,`` Commissioner James C. Kirie told other board members.

Dr. Leon Lederman, director of the Fermilab, welcomed the sanitary district`s support to help the lab win approval for the government-funded project, which if approved by the government would open sometime in the mid-1990s. The federal government is expected to decide on whether to authorize the project next year, Lederman said.

``They are very skilled in the art of tunnel digging,`` he added, referring to the sanitary district.

``The stakes are very high but the competition for this federal project is very strong,`` Kirie said. ``It would produce at least 40,000 jobs for Illinois.``

Fermilab`s Lederman estimated that the construction phase of the project would provide 20,000 to 30,000 jobs, and said the facility would employ 4,000 permanent employees.

Lederman likened the competition for the project to that for the Chrysler Saturn plant, in which Illinois was an unsuccessful bidder earlier this year. ``We are the only ones with the know-how and equipment to build tunnels of the magnitude and depth being spoken of for the Super Collider,`` said chief district engineer Frank E. Dalton to the commissioners. ``We can do it cheaper and faster than anyone else but we need to launch a massive political and public campaign to be successful.``

Dalton said Texas is the leading competitor for this project, and would like to construct it near the University of Texas in Austin. Lederman said California and Rhode Island also are competing for the SSC project.

Richard J. Troy, vice president of the sanitary district, noted that

``Our 35-foot diameter Deep Tunnel was bored through dolomite bedrock 300 feet below the surface. Boring the 10- to 12-foot-diameter Super Collider tunnel the same depth in the same material near Batavia would be no problem,`` he said.

He said that using the Fermi site, which already possesses the largest atom smasher, would save millions of dollars in land purchase costs for the Super Collider.

The 60-mile circular accelerator tunnel would in effect be the the world`s largest and fastest electronic racetrack in which subatomic particles, those smaller than even neutrons, protons and electrons, would smash into each other to try to unlock the secrets of atoms.

It would dwarf the achievement of Fermi lab`s present accelerator, the Tevatron, which last Sunday produced the most powerful energy collision in history, bringing scientific praise from around the world.

Moving from the sophisicated to the mundane, the sanitary district board also voted to grant permits for $750 to anyone who would move some of the 4.4 million cubic yards of spoil bank that occupies much of the 16-mile Cal-Sag Channel. The district wants to convert the channel into industrial, commercial, residential and recreational sites in its River Edge Renaissance economic redevelopment program in south Cook County.